"Mobile Marketing Isn't a QR Code," writes Chris Brogan, a Boston-based leading social media strategist. And the point he makes is well taken: Slapping a QR -- that's "Quick Response" -- code onto a flier or ad isn't worth much if the result is that your smartphone is directed to a website that isn't mobile friendly.
I haven't used QR codes much. But thanks to Eric Segal of Data Collaborative in Arlington, Massachusetts, I have a great tactic for using QR codes. The tactic is: Set up a special web redirect URL and embed it into your QR code. Presto! You have a long-term QR code that can be adapted for special uses.
Let's say you're printing a pop-up banner to go with a trade-show booth. You want a banner that can work for you at several trade shows annually, to reach a variety of audiences. The audiences are different. Let's say that one group likes blue skies. The other group likes cloudy skies. You're going to have booths during the next year at both the blue-sky and cloudy-sky trade shows. And you're going to have a booth at the green-grass show, too, which will attract folks who like both blue and cloudy skies.
What QR code to print on the banner? Your home page (mobilized)? A special landing page for blue-sky people. And then a new banner for the cloudy-sky people.
None of it. Send your QR code to a web page with a simple redirect script instead. Set up the default redirect so it sends traffic to your home page, or to your blue-sky page or to your cloudy-skies page.
But when the blue-sky convention is coming up, change the redirect so it points to your special web page constituting a mobile-ready landing page for blue-sky products and services.
Then, when the cloudy-sky people are about to hit town, simply change the URL redirect (but not the QR code itself. No new banner needed. Just a default web page
A few weeks after the cloudy-sky convention is over, change the redirect to point to your index page.
The QR code itself could be as simple as www.ourcompany.com/QRredirect. Then all you need to manage is the code on your website that points a page about blue skies. Once the blue skies conventiuon is over, you could change your QR code back to your web site.
At least until someone else wants the QR code to point to their page!
I'm staying in South Orange, New Jersey, for Thanksgiving. On Wednesday, I saw a poster on a village bulletin board at the railroad station offering a QR code for a survey on race relations at twotowns.org. But the QR code went to a dead link. If twotowns.org had used a redirect QR code, the redirect could have been set initially to go to the online race relations survey, and later to the site's simple index page.
Thanks for reading!
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